A place were I can write...

My simple blog of pictures of travel, friends, activities and the Universe we live in as we go slowly around the Sun.



December 29, 2017

Weather Vs. Climate...

Trump thinks climate change isn't real because it's cold out. This map proves him wrong.

The US and Canada are the most unusually cold places in the world right now.

By Brian Resnick

It’s freaking cold out there, America. But you don’t need a Vox explainer to know that. You knew it the second you woke up. Knew it in that dreadful moment just before peeling off the blankets, when you thought, This is the warmest and most comfortable I’ll feel all day.

The East Coast is in the teens and 20s. Temperatures in the Midwest are hovering near zero Fahrenheit. The brave, brave residents of International Falls, Minnesota, had to face negative 36 degrees (!!) on Wednesday morning. At that temperature, some preparations of automotive antifreeze will freeze. Record-breaking lake effect snows are blanketing Great Lake shores.

And the forecast is grim. Temperatures are expected to continue to drop through the start of the new year. The national average is expected to be around 10 degrees New Year’s morning, the Washington Post reports, “with about a third of locations below zero.”

But this forecast is not, however, evidence against climate change. Yet the President of the United States, who has tweeted his skepticism about global warming 115 times in the past, could not help himself last night:

Twit:
"In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!"

Yes, it can be weirdly cold in the United States, but, still, globally, much warmer than average because of climate change. Remember, weather and climate are two different things. Weather is what we’re experiencing in the moment. Climate is the broader trends that make certain weather experiences more or less likely.

Here’s one simple map from University of Maine's Climate Change Institute that proves Trump wrong.

It shows daily temperature anomaly — or, how weirdly different global temperatures were compared to a baseline from 1979 to 2000 — around the whole world. Overall, the world on December 28 was .5-degrees Celsius warmer on average, compared to the baseline. That’s true despite the fact parts of North America are 10-plus degrees below average.

North America is the most unusually cold place in the world right now. (Not all of it, though — Northern Alaska and Canada and the Southwest are all much warmer than usual.)

And rest assured, 2017 is still on track to be one of the warmest years on record.

So what’s happening with this cold weather?

Though it says nothing about global climate change, the cold spell is still extreme for this time of year. “Temperature anomalies on Saturday could be as much as 30 to 35 degrees [Fahrenheit] below normal,” the National Weather Center warned in its national outlook.

As Mashable’s Andrew Freeman explains, we can blame a northward shift in the jet stream in the Northern Pacific around Alaska. The Arctic jet stream is an area of fast-moving air high in the atmosphere that acts to separate regions of cold and warmer air.

The northward surge in the jet stream around Alaska means temperatures are actually warmer there than normal. This northward movement of the jet stream around Alaska then caused another section of it to dip into the Eastern US. As a consequence, freezing air around Hudson Bay is descending southward. Brrr.

And that cold has consequences. One is all the extra fuel we have to burn to keep warm. “Total U.S. [natural] gas consumption jumped 31 percent to 115.7 billion cubic feet on Tuesday from Friday,” Bloomberg reports. “That’s the most ever for this time of year.” Prices (which were already expect to rise across the board this winter) are expected to increase with the demand.

It’s also worth remembering that winter cold is dangerous. At zero Fahrenheit, and 15 mph winds, frostbite can set in on exposed skin in 30 minutes. And winter cold kills more Americans every year than summer heat.

Microgrid

Meet the microgrid, the technology poised to transform electricity

This is the path to a cleaner, more reliable, more resilient energy grid.

By David Roberts and Alvin Chang

If we want a livable climate for future generations, we need to slow, stop, and reverse the rise in global temperatures. To do that, we need to stop burning fossil fuels for energy.

To do that, we need to generate lots of carbon-free electricity and get as many of our energy uses as possible (including transportation and industry) hooked up to the electricity grid. Electrify everything!

We need a greener grid. But that’s not all.

The highly digital modern world also demands a more reliable grid, capable of providing high-quality power to facilities like hospitals or data centers, where even brief brownouts can cost money or lives.

The renewable energy sources with the most potential — wind and solar — are variable, which means that they come and go on nature’s schedule, not ours. They ramp up and down with the weather, so integrating them into the grid while maintaining (and improving) reliability means finding clever ways to balance out their swings.

Finally, recent blackouts in the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria highlight the need for a more resilient grid — one that can get back up and running quickly (at least for essential sites) after a disaster or attack.

It’s a triple challenge: We need, all at once, a greener, more reliable, more resilient electricity grid.

But hark! Lo! There is a technology, or a set of technologies, that promises one day to be a triple solution — to address all three of the grid’s needs at once.

We speak of the humble microgrid.

What is a microgrid?

Technically, a grid is any combination of power sources, power users, wires to connect them, and some sort of control system to operate it all.

Microgrid just means a small, freestanding grid. It can consist of several buildings, one small building (sometimes called a “nanogrid”), or even one person (a “picogrid”) with a backpack solar panel, an iPhone, and some headphones.

The research firm GTM counts “1,900 basic and advanced, operational and planned microgrids” in the US, with the market expected to grow quickly. Most microgrids today are basic, one-generator affairs, but more complex microgrids are popping up all over — there’s a cool one in Brooklyn, a cool one on Alcatraz Island, and the coolest one of all in Sonoma, California. Microgrids also play a big role in plans to rebuild Puerto Rico’s grid.

Let’s take a quick tour of microgrids and their potential.

Off-grid microgrids to extend power to the poor

Some microgrids stand on their own, apart from any larger grid, often in remote rural areas. These off-grid microgrids are a relatively cheap and quick way to secure some access to power for people who now lack it, often more quickly than large, centralized grids can be extended.

Grid-connected microgrids can “island” from the larger grid

Most microgrids, especially in wealthier nations, are grid-connected — they are embedded inside a bigger grid, like any other utility customer. All the examples cited above fit this bill.

What makes a microgrid a microgrid is that it can flip a switch (or switches) and “island” itself from its parent grid in the event of a blackout. This enables it to provide those connected to it with (at least temporary) backup power.

Again, most actually existing microgrids are extremely basic — think of a hospital with a diesel generator in the basement, or a big industrial facility with a combined-heat-and-power (CHP) facility on site that can provide some heat and power during a blackout.

Microgrids are only at the very front edge of their potential

Microgrids won’t be a core part of the clean-energy transition until they serve all three grid needs — greener, more reliable, more resilient.

Right now, most microgrids around the world rely on diesel generators, which are polluting and loud, so they’re not very green. (In the US, the primary sources are CHP and natural gas.) They only turn on once the grid is down, so they don’t help with day-to-day reliability. Of the three grid needs, most serve only resilience, and only for those lucky enough to be connected to one.

The next step: integrating more diversity, including distributed renewable energy

As basic as most of them are today, microgrids hold great promise for the future. Technology is rapidly expanding the possibilities.

Electricity use is becoming more controllable and adaptable, as every system and appliance learns to communicate over the internet.

Small-scale and community-scale electricity generators are getting cheaper, cleaner, and more diverse; they now include solar panels, small-scale wind, efficient natural gas generators and fuel cells, CHP, and more. (Solar panels, in particular, have become super-cheap.)

Energy storage is also becoming cheaper and more diverse, from various kinds of batteries and fuel cells to thermal storage in hot water or ice. (The Stone Edge Farm microgrid in Sonoma boasts five separate forms of storage.) Every bit of new storage helps to smooth out the variations in solar and wind, allowing more to be absorbed.

Software, AI, and machine learning are enabling intelligent integration of all these diverse resources.

Smart design and software can create microgrids specifically designed to integrate distributed renewable energy, or microgrids designed to provide “six nines” (99.9999 percent) reliability, or microgrids designed for maximum resilience. There are even “nested” microgrids within microgrids.

Next: microgrids need to work with the larger grid

Smarter microgrids can communicate on an ongoing basis with their parent grids, forming a beautiful friendship.

By aggregating together distributed, small-scale resources (solar panels, batteries, fuel cells, smart appliances and HVAC systems, etc.), a microgrid can present to the larger grid as a single entity — a kind of Voltron composed of distributed energy technologies.

This makes things easier on grid operators. They don’t necessarily relish the idea of communicating directly with millions (or billions) of discrete generators, buildings, and devices. It’s an overwhelming amount of data to assimilate. Microgrids can gather those smaller resources together into discrete, more manageable and predictable chunks.

The future: a grid of microgrids

A single smart microgrid, aggregating diverse, distributed low-carbon resources, can provide cheap, clean, reliable power to those within it. It can also provide grid services to the larger grid around it.

What really tickles the imagination is a grid that contains dozens or hundreds of networked microgrids — even a grid that is someday composed of networked microgrids. This kind of “modular architecture,” with multiple semi-autonomous nodes operating in parallel, is more secure and efficient than a centralized system with a few, large points of failure.

Microgrids may never eliminate the need for large utilities, power plants, and transmission lines, but moving more power generation, management, and consumption under local control makes everyone less dependent on them.

And it makes the grid greener, more reliable, and resilient — a three’fer.

Mental rot and worm eaten brain is more like it...

Donald Trump’s Mental Faculties Continue to Erode

KEVIN DRUM

Mark Schmidt of the New York Times held an impromptu interview with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago yesterday, and there are takes galore lighting up the internet. Probably all of them are accurate, but for my money the main takeaway isn’t something you can illustrate with an excerpt from the interview. But I’ll try anyway:

SCHMIDT: What are you willing to do on infrastructure? How far are you willing to go? How much money?

TRUMP: I actually think we can get as many Democrat votes as we have Republican. Republicans want to see infrastructure. Michael, we have spent, as of about a month ago, $7 trillion in the Middle East. And the Middle East is worse than it was 17 years ago….And if you want $12 to fix up a road or a highway, you can’t get it…. I believe we can do health care in a bipartisan way, because now we’ve essentially gutted and ended Obamacare.

….Wait, wait, let me just tell you. … Also, beyond the individual mandate, but also [inaudible] associations. You understand what the associations are….So now I have associations….That’s gonna be millions and millions of people….Now I’ve ended the individual mandate. And the other thing I wish you’d tell people. So when I do this, and we’ve got health care, you know, McCain did his vote. … But what we have. I had a hundred congressmen that said no and I was able to talk them into it. They’re great people.

Two things: No. 1, I have unbelievably great relationships with 97 percent of the Republican congressmen and senators. I love them and they love me. That’s No. 1. And No. 2, I know more about the big bills. … [Inaudible.] … than any president that’s ever been in office. Whether it’s health care and taxes.

….I’ll tell you something [inaudible] … Put me on the defense, I was a great student and all this stuff. Oh, he doesn’t know the details, these are sick people….But Michael, I know the details of taxes better than anybody. Better than the greatest C.P.A. I know the details of health care better than most, better than most….I believe that because of the individual mandate and the associations, the Democrats will and certainly should come to me and see if they can do a really great health care plan for the remaining people.

This is a taste, but you have to read the whole interview to really get it. This simply is not a man in full control of his mental faculties. He’s always been narcissistic and blowhardish, but over the course of the interview he’s completely unable to stay focused on a topic for even a few seconds. He veers off into his Electoral College win constantly. He stops to insist there’s no Russian collusion at least a dozen times. He displays no knowledge of anything. It’s like talking to a third-grader.

I don’t know what’s going on with the guy, but even by Donald Trump standards he’s not all there. This is not someone who should be occupying the Oval Office.

Greatest Generation?

Stop Blaming Boomers. It’s the Greatest Generation That Ruined America.

KEVIN DRUM

I’m running out of things to say this year, so how about this: We should stop blaming boomers for “ruining America.” Everyone is picking on the wrong generation.

* Start in the 60s and 70s. Boomers were in college then, and they played significant roles in the rise of the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the environmental movement, the sexual revolution, and the antiwar movement. Those are all good things, right?

* In the late 70s and 80s, the economic policies that would define the next several decades were put in place. But at this point, boomers were junior analysts and low-level aides. This stuff was put in place by Reagan conservatives, members in good standing of the Greatest Generation.

* In the 90s, Bill Clinton tried to reverse some of this stuff. It was only half-heartedly, true, but then again, Clinton was only barely a boomer. And he never had a chance anyway. The conservative take on the economy was set in stone by then.

There’s no question that boomers have benefited from all this stuff, but they’re not the ones who ruined the economy for millennials. You can chalk that up to the Greatest Generation. Maybe we should come up with a new name for these folks?

Scrubbing Science from Government Websites

2017 Was a Big Year for Scrubbing Science from Government Websites. Here’s the List.

Are the changes routine, rebranding, or censorship?

MEGAN JULA AND REBECCA LEBER

Moments after President Donald Trump took the oath of office last January, nearly all references to climate change disappeared from the White House official website. A page detailing former President Barack Obama’s plans to build a clean energy economy, address climate change, and protect the environment became a broken link (archived here). Instead, “An America First Energy Plan” appeared, which touted Trump’s commitment to eliminating “harmful and unnecessary policies,” such as the Climate Action Plan that proposed a reduction in carbon emissions. Now, the web address leads to a collection of energy and environment fact sheets, White House news, and remarks by the president.

Whenever a new administration takes charge, government websites are often revised. But during the Trump administration’s first year in office, a striking number of references to science, climate, energy, and the environment have all but disappeared from various governmental websites. 

Individually, the changes might not seem like much. Indeed, spokespersons from several agencies noted that revisions are part of routine website updates. When asked about the removal of “Change” from an NIH page that once was titled “Climate Change and Human Health,” an NIH spokesperson described it as “a minor change to a title page,” adding, “The information we provide remains the same—in fact, it’s been expanded.”

But even though website changes range from negligible to rebranding, in some cases they reach the level of what critics assert is outright censorship. “Each one represents a slow chipping away at science communication from the government,” said Gretchen Goldman, the research director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

One watchdog group, the Environmental and Data Governance Initiative, has been monitoring the changes to tens of thousands of federal environmental agency web pages. Every week, their team reviews the changes to determine how serious they are. 

“What has happened is a significant and systematic shift in ways that certain types of information and messages are presented on federal websites,” Toly Rinberg, a member of the EDGI website monitoring committee said. “If they are going to make those changes, they should be able to explain why they are doing it.” He also points out that these websites are all paid for by taxpayers, so “it’s significant to reduce access to resources the public is paying for.”

Here are some of the times that scientific references have disappeared or changed during Trump’s first year in office: 

* Environmental Protection Agency: EPA websites have arguably seen more radical changes than those in any other government agency. Scores of links to materials that help local officials prepare for climate change have all been scrubbed. On April 28, the EPA removed its website “Climate ​and ​Energy ​Resources ​for State, ​Local, ​and ​Tribal ​Governments.” ​In July, ​a ​new ​website titled ​“Energy ​Resources ​for ​State, ​Local, ​and ​Tribal ​Governments” ​was ​launched ​in ​its place. The site had fewer ​pages ​and omitted ​resources ​relating ​to ​climate ​and ​climate ​change; about 15 mentions of the words “climate change” were gone from the main page alone. The missing pages once had information detailing the risk of climate change, the approaches states were taking to curb emissions, and state plans to adapt to extreme weather. ​References ​to ​the EPA’s ​federal ​leadership ​and ​goals ​to ​cover ​100 percent ​of ​its ​own ​electricity ​use ​nationwide ​through ​purchasing ​renewable ​energy ​have also ​been ​removed.

* Department of the Interior: A once extensive overview of the Interior’s climate change priorities is now a few sentences about the types of land the agency protects. Mentions of rising sea levels, worsening wildfires, and threatened wildlife are gone. The only mention of climate change in the body of text says “the impacts of climate change have led the Department to focus on how we manage our nation’s public lands and resources.” The Bureau of Land Management’s language about the purpose of the 2015 Hydraulic Fracturing Rule, and a link to that rule from a page on regulations for onshore energy production, were removed.

* Department of Transportation: The DOT Federal Highway Administration changed language across multiple pages relating to environmental effects of transportation; “climate change” and “greenhouse gases” were replaced with terms like “sustainability” and “emissions.” For example, its summary changed from helping “reduce greenhouse gas pollution and improve resilience to climate change impacts” to helping “enhance sustainability, improve resilience, and reduce energy use and emissions on our highway system.”

* Department of Energy: The Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy made extensive changes to pages involving the Bioenergy Technologies Office, Wind Energy Technologies Office and Vehicle Technologies Office, including decreasing emphasis on renewable fuels as a replacement for fossil fuels and increasing emphasis on economic growth. The “Clean Energy Investment Center” was renamed “Energy Investor Center” and links to clean energy resources were erased. The phrase “clean energy” has been erased from the center’s page. E&E News reported a DOE statement said, “The decision was made entirely by the career staff within that office” and that the center’s name change was made to “better reflect the broader focus of the project.” 

* Office of Science and Technology Policy: This White House office still has no director (a position referred to as the president’s top science adviser) and many of its positions remain unfilled. In February, it removed a line from a description of the office that said it “ensures that the policies of the Executive Branch are informed by sound science.”

* Department of State: In January, the descriptions of the Office of Global Change and the Office of the Special Envoy for Climate Change were rewritten. The Office of Global Change’s mission statement was significantly altered with the addition of the terms “adaptation” and “sustainable landscapes” and the removal of the term “greenhouse gas.” The envoy website rephrased the description on its homepage from being “committed to combating climate change” to being “responsible for developing, implementing, and overseeing U.S. international policy on climate change.” Several links, including to the Climate Action Report, were removed from both office pages.

* Federal Emergency Management Agency: Statistics on access ​to ​electricity ​and ​drinking water in Puerto Rico ​from ​the ​“Federal Response ​Updates” section ​on ​FEMA’s ​“Hurricane ​Maria” ​webpage were removed in early October. ​The statistics were later restored.

* National Institutes of Health: The environmental unit of the NIH, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, changed some mentions of “climate change” to “climate.” Links to ​an educational fact sheet on climate change’s threats to human health are gone, though the sheet is still hosted by the NIH site.

* National Park Service: More than 90 documents describing national parks’ climate action plans, which include how different parks are responding to climate changes, have been removed from the Climate Friendly Parks website. NPS told Vice’s Motherboard the documents are being made more accessible for people with disabilities, and until they are reinstated they will be available via an email request.

“When you see something change in a deliberate way, it’s because somebody spent time to think about it,” Rinberg said. “If an employee feels strongly that they need to change the way they are talking about the work they have done, we should know why.”

Deliberate rewording extends beyond websites, as well. In August, The Guardian reported that Trump administration officials had instructed U.S. Department of Agriculture staff to avoid the term “climate change” in their work and use “weather extremes” instead. NPR found that scientists have begun censoring themselves and omitting “climate change” from public grant summaries.

To be sure, some information remains untouched. The most noticeable items are federal datasets on climate change. NASA and NOAA’s websites also remain intact, possibly because Trump’s picks to head the agencies haven’t been installed yet.

But all told, the changes are hardly surprising in an administration that intends to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, has blocked the Clean Power Plan, dropped climate change as a national security threat, attempted to boost fossil fuels, and rolled back efforts to plan for climate change.

Goldman says it will be important to continue monitoring changes to agency websites in the coming year, as well as keeping an eye on new lower level appointments and any interference with scientists’ work. When planning for the future, Goldman says, “I think we should brace ourselves.”

Cash In...

Private Prison Companies Are About to Cash In on Trump’s Deportation Regime

On the ropes in 2016, CoreCivic, GEO Group, and others see big money in immigration detention.

SAMANTHA MICHAELS AND MADISON PAULY

In October, when executives from the country’s biggest prison company held their annual leadership conference at a golf resort owned by President Donald Trump, they had much to celebrate: lucrative contracts, strong stock prices, and a good shot at expanding their reach in the year ahead, thanks largely to a broadening crackdown on undocumented immigrants and a need for more space to detain them.

It was a glaring reminder of how far the private prison industry has come since the final months of the Obama administration, when—shortly after the publication of Mother Jones’ award-winning investigation of a Louisiana private prison—the Justice Department pledged to phase out contracts with prison companies and the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigrant detention, suggested it might consider doing the same. Those days now seem far behind for America’s for-profit prison giants, which heartily backed Trump during the campaign, gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to his inaugural committee after the election, and are now set to benefit from his newly passed tax plan. “I do think we can do a lot of privatizations and private prisons,” Trump said in 2016. “It seems to work a lot better.”

When Trump got to Washington, the biggest prison companies were already making more money than ever from immigrant detention, and today their prospects have never looked rosier. Fueled by the administration’s deportation dragnet, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has predicted a surge in its daily population of detainees, from around 34,000 in July to more than 51,000 over the next year—and prison companies are more than happy to accommodate. In April, GEO Group executives won the administration’s first private immigration detention contract, for a facility in Conroe, Texas, that’s expected to bring in $44 million annually. This year the company also started operating an ICE detention center in Folkston, Georgia, that could boost its revenue another $21 million.

Another opportunity for growth might be farther north. Under Trump, immigration enforcement has shifted, with fewer migrants apprehended at the border and many more caught in raids throughout the country’s interior. That means ICE is hoping to incarcerate more of its detainees in the heartland, near where they’re arrested. “It’s good business sense to have bed capacity in close proximity to where our operations are,” says Philip Miller, deputy executive associate director for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations.

The private prison industry is heeding the call. In October, ICE issued a request for information about potential locations for up to 3,000 new detention beds within 180 miles of Chicago, Detroit, Salt Lake City, and St. Paul, Minnesota. While ICE isn’t answering questions about who responded to its October inquiry (the National Immigrant Justice Center has a pending Freedom of Information Act request), it’s not hard to guess who’s in the running. Soon after ICE’s request went out, GEO Group chairman and CEO George Zoley told investors that his company was “very interested” in building the new detention centers the government was looking for. “GEO has such an appetite for these kinds of facilities,” Zoley said, “particularly with the contemplated length of the contracts—which we estimate to be approximately 10 years.” And Sheriff Michael Downey of Kankakee County, Illinois, whose department was the only public agency to respond to ICE’s Chicago-area request, says an ICE official told him that “all the major players” in the private prison industry had also expressed interest.

One of those players is CoreCivic—formerly known as the Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA—which in early December proposed a $100 million detention center in Elkhart, Indiana, across a county road from the local landfill and jail. The site, within 180 miles of Chicago and Detroit, would initially have 1,240 beds but could later be expanded to hold 1,400 people, making it one of the largest immigration detention centers in the country.

CoreCivic’s construction proposal will go before Elkhart County commissioners early next year, and ICE is planning to ask for formal bids around Chicago in 2018. In the meantime, a coalition of local residents and immigrant rights activists are leading a campaign against CoreCivic, arguing that the detention center would drive out immigrant workers and exacerbate an already acute labor shortage in the booming manufacturing town. “I know people who are thinking about, if this happens, they’re packing up and leaving,” resident Rafael Correa told a local news crew.

But according to coalition organizer Richard Aguirre, most Elkhart officials and business leaders have so far been reluctant to criticize the proposal publicly, and it still has a solid chance of being approved next year. CoreCivic, Aguirre says, “thought they would get a warm reception here because this is a decisive county for Donald Trump.”

So is Uinta County, Wyoming, which went 72 percent for Trump in 2016 and where local officials in June passed resolutions unanimously supporting a bid by the Utah-based Management & Training Corporation to construct a for-profit immigration detention center near a local “road to nowhere.” Unlike Elkhart, Uinta—hurt by the loss of its oil and gas sector, and badly in need of the tax revenue and 150 or so jobs an MTC facility would bring—resembles the depressed regions historically targeted by private prison companies for development. (According to a Uinta County Herald report, the county clerk “thinks the proposed facility has the potential to be one of the best things to happen to the county in a very long time.”) MTC’s proposal hasn’t been finalized, but the company hopes to fill ICE’s need for detention capacity near Salt Lake City, a company spokesman confirmed last month.

Meanwhile, despite the drop-off in border apprehensions, detention centers in the Southwest are far from empty. Back in October, CoreCivic reported to investors that migration across the border had started to tick back up—and that more immigrants were slowly filling its detention centers. “If this trend continues,” CEO Damon Hininger said, “it is likely ICE will have additional detention capacities for interior enforcement…as well as in traditional Southwest border regions.” ICE is even seeking an additional 1,000 beds in Texas, where it already has capacity to detain more than 10,000 immigrants. Expanding the country’s immigration detention network to more than 51,000 beds will require $1.2 billion from Congress, though it’s unclear if that kind of money will be made available. The Senate’s budget bill would boost detention funds by 7 percent but would only cover about 39,000 beds, while the House’s bill would fund about 44,000. “My best guess is that ICE’s final funding for detention will be somewhere between those goalposts,” says Mary Small, a policy director for Detention Watch Network, an advocacy group that monitors immigrant detention. “But I also think it’s very important to say that in this Congress, who the hell knows?”

M78

Interstellar dust clouds and glowing nebulae abound in the fertile constellation of Orion. One of the brightest, M78, is centered in this colorful, wide field view, covering an area north of Orion's belt. At a distance of about 1,500 light-years, the bluish reflection nebula is around 5 light-years across. Its tint is due to dust preferentially reflecting the blue light of hot, young stars. Reflection nebula NGC 2071 is just to the left of M78. To the right, and much more compact in appearance, the intriguing McNeil's Nebula is a recently recognized variable nebula associated with a young sun-like star. Deeper red flecks of emission from Herbig-Haro objects, energetic jets from stars in the process of formation, stand out against the dark dust lanes. The exposure also brings out the region's fainter pervasive glow of atomic hydrogen gas.

A few not funny...





South Korea seizes ship

South Korea seizes ship it claims transferred oil to North Korea

By Jake Kwon and James Griffiths

South Korea has seized a Hong Kong-registered ship that allegedly transferred oil to a North Korean vessel in violation of United Nations sanctions.

The South Korean Foreign Ministry said the Lighthouse Winmore left the port of Yeosu in South Korea carrying refined oil which was then transferred to a North Korean ship in international waters on October 19.

The US Treasury Department released satellite imagery in November of two ships allegedly performing an illegal ship-to-ship transfer in international waters on the same day.

Satellite imagery the US says shows a ship-to-ship transfer, possibly of oil, between two vessels in an effort to evade sanctions on North Korea.
Chinese ship transferring oil

It identified one of the ships as a sanctioned North Korean vessel, the Rye Song Gang 1, but did not name the other. South Korean officials could not confirm Friday if the second ship was the Lighthouse Winmore.

"UN Security Council sanctions prohibit the transfer of anything to a North Korean ship," a South Korean Foreign Ministry official told CNN, adding the Lighthouse Winmore was seized when it re-entered Yeosu on November 24.

President Trump said Beijing had been "caught red-handed," after the satellite images were republished in South Korean media earlier this week.

South Korea said the Lighthouse Winmore and its crew were still in South Korean custody and under investigation. There were 23 Chinese nationals and two Burmese nationals on board the ship, officials said, adding they would be permitted to leave only when the investigation was concluded.

China has denied breaching UN sanctions on North Korea.

The Lighthouse Winmore was one of 10 ships the US asked the UN to ban from international ports this month over its alleged dealings with North Korea, according to Reuters.

That move came after the UN blacklisted four ships in October, including one that was caught smuggling 30,000 North Korean-made rocket-propelled grenades in 2016.

According to South Korea, the Lighthouse Winmore was being leased by a Taiwanese company, the Billions Bunker Group, and was en route to Taiwan when it made a ship-to-ship transfer of its oil cargo to four ships, including one North Korean ship.

"This is one of the main ways in which North Korea uses an illegal network to circumvent UN Security Council sanctions," the South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said. It is customary in South Korea that officials do not give their names.

The Hong Kong government said in a statement Friday it had noted media reports that the Lighthouse Winmore had been seized. "We are liaising with the Korean parties concerned to obtain further information about the incident, and will take appropriate actions as necessary," the statement said.

'Very disappointed' in China

China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying on Friday reiterated that Beijing is enforcing all UN Security Council sanctions against North Korea, aimed at curbing Pyongyang's missile and nuclear weapons development.

In an interview with the New York Times published Thursday, Trump claimed "oil is going into North Korea" and appeared to blame China, saying if Beijing fails to put pressure on Pyongyang then the US may take punitive economic actions against Beijing.

"China on trade has ripped off this country more than any other element of the world in history has ripped off anything," Trump said.

"If they don't help us with North Korea, then I do what I've always said I want to do. China can help us much more, and they have to help us much more."

He added: "China's hurting us very badly on trade, but I have been soft on China because the only thing more important to me than trade is war."

A senior US State Department official told CNN Thursday the US is "aware that certain vessels have engaged in UN-prohibited activities, including ship-to-ship transfers of refined petroleum and the transport of coal from North Korea."

"We have evidence that some of the vessels engaged in these activities are owned by companies in several countries, including China," the official said. "We condemn these acts and hope that any UNSC members, including China, work more closely together to shut down smuggling activities."

Pyongyang has for years used deceptive shipping practices to help bring in revenue for the country's regime, analysts say, and the US has called for more to be done to crackdown on ships transporting goods to and from North Korea.

UN Security Council resolutions passed this year stipulate "all Member States shall prohibit the entry into their ports of such designated vessels," save for some circumstances, including in emergencies or if they are granted humanitarian exceptions by the UN.

Scary shit...

Trump tells NYT he thinks Mueller will 'be fair'

By Zachary Cohen

President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he thinks special counsel Robert Mueller is "going to be fair" in his investigation into possible collusion between Trump's team and Russian officials.

His comments -- made during an interview with The New York Times -- come after Republicans and supporters of Trump had raised questions over Mueller and his investigative team.

Several Republicans, including Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, have called for the removal of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe -- a move Democrats have argued is an effort to undermine Mueller as his investigation ramps up and to give Trump cover should he try to remove Mueller, a step the White House insists is not on the table.

Trump said the investigation "makes the country look very bad, and it puts the country in a very bad position. So the sooner it's worked out, the better it is for the country."

The President was also asked if former President Barack Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, was more loyal than his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions.

"I don't want to get into loyalty, but ... I will say this: Holder protected President Obama. Totally protected him," Trump responded. "When you look at the things that they did, and Holder protected the President. And I have great respect for that, I'll be honest."

Trump again said in the interview that it was "too bad" Sessions had recused himself from the Russia investigation.

Asked if he would order the Justice Department to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails, Trump told the Times: "I have the absolute right to do what I want with the Justice Department. But for purposes of hopefully thinking I'm going to be treated fairly, I've stayed uninvolved with this particular matter."

More Americans said they approve of how Mueller is handling the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election than said they disapprove, a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS found last week.

A majority of Americans said they disapprove of Trump's handling of the same investigation, while just a third said they approve -- a result that has held fairly steady over the last five months of CNN surveys.

Can’t afford to get drunk...

Why Belgians can’t afford to get drunk at New Year

Fragmentation of the internal market is a long-standing bugbear of Margrethe Vestager.

By EMMET LIVINGSTONE AND NICHOLAS HIRST

Fighting excessive beer prices has to be one of the most popular things the EU has ever done.

European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager had an early Christmas present for Belgium’s (many) beer drinkers in late November, when she formally charged the world’s biggest brewer, AB InBev, with abusing a dominant position to rip off consumers in its home market.

The case, however, is far more than a play for popularity in the bars of Brussels and Antwerp. Vestager’s charge sheet actually represents the latest offensive in a far bigger campaign that she is waging across many sectors to break down the visible and invisible barriers that mean Europe’s 25-year-old single market is still highly fragmented.

In the beer case, Vestager’s preliminary finding was that AB InBev tried to stop Belgian supermarkets from importing its popular beers Jupiler and Leffe from the Netherlands and France, where they cost less because there is more competition.

Vestager argued not only that “Belgian consumers may have had to pay more for their favorite beers,” but that AB InBev’s alleged “practices would breach EU competition rules, because they deny consumers the benefits of the EU single market: choice and lower prices.”

This is the issue that really infuriates the Danish commissioner: companies trying to break up the EU’s internal market to their own advantage. On moving to Brussels, she expressed frustration about the media sector’s divide-and-rule tactics that meant she could no longer tune into her beloved Danish television dramas. She complained: “I, for one, cannot understand why I can watch my favorite Danish channels on my tablet in Copenhagen — a service I paid for — but I can’t when I am in Brussels.”

Each sector uses different strategies to slice and dice the single market, and she has already taken on cases in sectors such as energy, technology and transport.

In the case of AB InBev, she accused the company of removing French- and Dutch-language text from labels on cans sold in the Netherlands and France, and blocking certain Dutch retailers from taking advantage of promotional sales — all with the aim of preventing exports into Belgium.

AB InBev declined to comment on the details of the case beyond saying that it took compliance “very seriously” and had “been working constructively with the European Commission since the investigation was announced in June 2016.”

Stuart MacFarlane, the company’s zone president for Europe, also insisted at a recent POLITICO event that the company was not trying to harm the single market. “Contrary to some views, some may feel we are a little too attached to our borders these days, but I can say our company is fully committed to  [the EU internal market],” he said.

Agustín Reyna, a lawyer with European consumer organization BEUC, said it appeared that case investigators in Brussels were breaking new ground by examining non-contractual practices, such as labels, that suppliers use to restrict cross-border trade.

“The industry can be very creative in trying to bypass antitrust rules to keep the domestic offer at a level which allows them to illegally maximise the purchasing power of consumers,” said Reyna.

While the Commission is trying to prioritize the single market, competition policy is often the only hammer it can wield to make sure that it works.

Single market 2.0

Vestager’s single market adversaries range from the mighty to the relatively small. One of her biggest opponents was the Russian gas export monopoly Gazprom, which the Commission pushed to step back from contracts that prevented gas being sold from one national market to another.

On the smaller side, she is investigating video game makers for making it difficult for gamers in one country to buy and use cheaper games from another, as well as tour operators for charging holidaymakers in different countries different prices for the same hotel room.

The message to the food sector is clear. Retailers have long been deeply concerned about “fast-moving goods” such as food, drinks and toiletries that command varying prices in neighboring countries.

Known among retailers as “territorial supply constraints,” suppliers allegedly use an array of tactics to prevent supermarkets from one country from hunting for bargains in another: The packaging varies, the recipes are different or — in the case of Central and Eastern Europe — the quality is worse.

Retailers complain that they can’t fight back because shoppers expect certain branded goods in stores.

“Their bargaining position is so great, our margins are so small,” said Neil McMillan, the director of advocacy and political affairs at Brussels supermarket lobby EuroCommerce, who added that big brands had partitioned the internal market for some 20 years.

Still, it remains to be seen whether the beer probe will open the floodgates to more cases in the retail business. Most people working in the industry saw the AB InBev case as a one-off, and were unaware of any other investigations into similar practices by the EU’s highly secretive competition authorities.

Food and drinks conglomerates, on the other hand, argue that these practices reflect different consumer demands and tastes — not to mention varying national rules that govern how to market a product. As one person from the industry put it: “Meeting preferences does not equate to barriers.”

A competition partner at a Brussels law firm said clients from various industries frequently ask about the legal options for segregating markets, with a view to controlling price. “They like to have price differentials — it’s not a theoretical issue. I see it quite a bit,” the lawyer said.

Skimming and scheming

The idea that Belgians may be overpaying for goods is not new.

The Benelux Union launched an inquiry into territorial supply constraints last year but the final report will not be published until early 2018.

The Belgian competition authority concluded a probe into supermarket prices in 2012, finding prices in Belgium were on average 10 percent higher than in Germany and the Netherlands, and 7.5 percent higher than in France.

Labeling and packaging may play a role, it warned — but so did Belgians’ willingness to pay more for the same quality.

Also, supermarkets operating in large countries such as Germany can negotiate larger discounts because they bought in bulk, which contributed to products being cheaper across borders. “Retailers in Luxembourg are placed at a competitive disadvantage,” one of the industry officials said.

Representatives of large consumer brands argue that there is no real problem on the internal market and that price differences are most often explained by gaps between wage and taxation among different EU countries.

“There’s a perception that manufacturers are driving the price. This is not at all the case,” said Walter Gelens, the chief executive of the Belgian and Luxembourgish brands association BABM. “In fact, it’s the retailer,” he added.

A 2016 study from Belgian consumer association Test Achats, for example, found that Belgium’s Colruyt group sets prices even at the level of different neighborhoods: A basket of consumer goods in a store in the gritty Brussels neighborhood of Schaerbeek is priced slightly cheaper than in an outlet in the more affluent commune of Woluwe-Saint-Pierre.

While Vestager is keen to defend Belgian drinkers, she was flummoxed at a recent event when asked what her favorite beer was.

Seeking a diplomatic way out, she replied: “Here in Belgium there are more than 1,000 beers, so no single favorite.”

Iran nuclear deal

How Trump could kill the Iran nuclear deal in January

The president will soon face a series of deadlines during which he could deliver on a campaign promise to rip up the 2015 agreement.

By MICHAEL CROWLEY

President Donald Trump allowed the Iran nuclear deal to survive through 2017, but the new year will offer him another chance to blow up the agreement — and critics and supporters alike believe he may take it.

By mid-January, the president will face new legal deadlines to choose whether to slap U.S. sanctions back on Tehran. Senior lawmakers and some of Trump's top national security officials are trying to preserve the agreement. But the deal's backers fear Trump has grown more willing to reject the counsel of his foreign policy team, as he did with his recent decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

The decision represents an opportunity for Trump to deliver on a campaign promise to rip up the Iran deal, one he has repeatedly deferred at the urging of senior officials.

When Trump last publicly addressed the status of the Iran agreement, in mid-October, he indicated his patience had worn thin with what he has called “the worst deal ever,” and demanded that Congress and European countries take action to address what he considers the deal’s weakness.

“[I]n the event we are not able to reach a solution working with Congress and our allies, then the agreement will be terminated,” Trump said in an Oct. 13 speech.

The three months since then have shown little progress toward such a solution.

In an effort to save the deal, members of Congress are discussing legislation that would give Trump political cover to extend the deal. But it’s not clear whether Republicans and Democrats can agree on even a symbolic measure in time.

“It’s entirely possible that Trump tells Congress and the Europeans, ‘I gave you 90 days to get your act together and you didn't — and I’m done,’” said Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish Washington think tank with close ties to the Trump White House.

The deal was negotiated in 2015 by the Obama administration, along with five other nations. It lifted U.S. and European sanctions on Iran in exchange for strict limits on Tehran’s nuclear program. The deal’s supporters say military action was the only realistic alternative to preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Critics say the deal allowed Iran to retain too much nuclear capability and that the sanctions should have been given more time to bite.

The deadlines for Trump begin on Jan. 11, when the agreement requires him — as it does every 90 days — to certify whether Tehran is meeting its obligations under the deal. International inspectors who visit the country’s nuclear facilities have repeatedly said Iran is doing so. But Trump refused to certify Iranian compliance in mid-October, citing in part Iranian aggression throughout the Middle East.

Trump’s refusal to certify had no immediate practical effect on the deal, though under the law it triggered a 60-day window for Congress to restore the sanctions by a simple majority, without the possibility of a Senate filibuster. While expectations were high for some congressional action that Trump could point to as a response to his complaints, Congress became consumed by tax reform and took no action. One hard-line measure that attracted attention this fall, devised by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), went nowhere after Democrats made clear they would strongly oppose it.

Even more consequential are upcoming deadlines for Trump to continue the temporary waiver of U.S. sanctions on Iran, which the deal dictates will not be permanently repealed for several more years. The president must renew the waivers every 120 days. Sources familiar with the law said multiple waiver deadlines arrive between Jan. 12 and Jan. 17, forcing Trump to reassess the deal.

If Trump rejects the waivers and restores biting sanctions, Tehran is certain to claim the U.S. has breached the agreement and — supporters of the deal say — may restart its nuclear program. That could court a military confrontation with the U.S. and Israel. At a minimum, the U.S would find itself isolated abroad given that every other party to the deal — France, the U.K., Germany, China and Russia — all strongly oppose a U.S. withdrawal from the agreement.

Top Trump administration officials, including national security adviser H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, all hope to avoid that outcome, telling others that while they may not love the nuclear deal, the potential fallout from a unilateral U.S. withdrawal would be too great to risk.

McMaster has met with Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and the committee’s ranking Democrat, Ben Cardin of Maryland, to discuss potential legislation that might appease Trump. As the year wound down, Cardin and Corker continued discussions about what such legislation could look like.

Congressional sources said the goal is to find language that would take a hard line on Iran — but on non-nuclear issues, so as not to violate the deal’s terms, which prohibit the imposition of new conditions on Iran’s nuclear program after the deal was concluded.

A legislative fix might also end the requirement that Trump certify the deal every 90 days, removing a recurring political thorn in the president’s side.

A congressional measure “may convince Trump to somehow say he has changed the conversation and he may not take any precipitous action in the near term,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonprofit Washington group that strongly supports the nuclear agreement.

Shortly before Congress adjourned for the holidays, Corker expressed optimism on the subject: “I’m actually feeling like we might get someplace,” he told POLITICO.

But Corker and Cardin will have little time after Congress reconvenes to craft language before the certification and sanctions waiver deadlines arrive. “There’s a chance they can at least get it agreed to, but I can't see a final bill getting to the president's desk for a signature,” Dubowitz said.

Trump administration officials have also appealed to the French, British and Germans to come up with proposals that might serve as supplements to the nuclear deal, but the Europeans have shown minimal interest.

That has left supporters of the deal alarmed that Trump may finally shrug off appeals from top officials and, in effect, tear up the deal as he has long threatened to do. A National Security Council spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

The decision on Iran comes as the Trump administration reviews its strategy in the region. The national security adviser, McMaster, plans to roll out results of a review of U.S. Syria policy in January, according to two sources who have consulted with the White House on Middle East issues. The new strategy is expected to focus on checking Iranian influence in the country as Syria’s nearly seven-year civil war winds down.

Kimball said Trump's Jerusalem decision — against the advice of senior national security officials — signaled the president may be willing to follow other advisers' voices for major foreign policy decisions.

“Donald Trump has shown with the Jerusalem and other decisions that he does not have the wisdom to listen to even his closest advisers,” Kimball said.

“The usual logic that guides U.S. national security policy may be chucked out the window because the president is trying to fulfill a reckless campaign promise,” he added.

Postal Service attack...

Trump: Postal Service is ‘dumber and poorer’ for not charging Amazon more

By REBECCA MORIN

President Donald Trump called on the United States Postal Service to charge Amazon and others “much more” for shipping, adding that the government agency is becoming “dumber and poorer” by not doing so.

“Why is the United States Post Office, which is losing many billions of dollars a year, while charging Amazon and others so little to deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer? Should be charging MUCH MORE!” the president wrote on Twitter.

Amazon announced Wednesday that the company had a record-setting holiday season, though it is unclear if that is what prompted the president’s critique.

Jeff Bezos, who is the CEO of Amazon and also owns The Washington Post, has been target of Trump in the past.

The president – who has an often-rocky relationship with the media – has also previously accused The Washington Post of fabricating facts and has called the paper a lobbyist for Amazon.

Transgender ban

Next battleground for Trump transgender ban: Recruiting stations

Despite policy to bar all transgender troops, the Pentagon is under court order to open the ranks on Jan. 1.

By JACQUELINE KLIMAS

When Conner Callahan first tried to join the military he encountered widespread confusion among recruiters who didn’t know how to process a transgender volunteer.

“No one seemed to know what to tell me or what was happening,” recalled Callahan, a 29-year-old public safety officer in North Carolina. “I reached out to every branch, talked to different recruiters, and I heard everything from, ‘You can’t join,' to ‘Maybe, we’ll have to see.’”

That was before President Donald Trump declared last summer he was barring all transgender personnel and issued orders to overturn the Obama-era decision allowing them to serve openly and the Pentagon to begin taking in new recruits in 2017.

But when Callahan tries again after New Year’s he should get a much different reception. The Pentagon is now under a court order to begin accepting transgender recruits on Jan. 1. The deadline poses the biggest test yet for Trump’s ban, which remains bogged down in a series of legal challenges that Justice Department lawyers have failed repeatedly to fend off.

“I’ll be there at the door, hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst,” said Callahan, a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits who says he wanted to join the ranks since he was 13 and hopes to become a bomb disposal specialist.

An estimated 4,000 transgender troops were already serving when the ban was lifted under President Barack Obama and they were permitted to serve openly, according to a 2016 study by the government-funded RAND Corporation. Those still in uniform have also been permitted to remain while the Pentagon studies the issue and it winds its way through multiple federal courts.

In the meantime, advocates say they are aware of dozens of transgender men and women like Callahan interested in joining the ranks — including some they expect to swiftly challenge the Pentagon’s insistence that it will carry out the court order beginning next week.

The Defense Department had been preparing to accept transgender recruits — and was drafting special regulations to accommodate them — when Trump upended the issue in July. He tweeted without warning that “the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military.”

That order came in a volley of tweets on the morning of July 26 that caught many by surprise — including the military leadership.

“After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow.......Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming.........victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you."

The reason, Trump declared, is “our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”

His declaration was widely condemned by lawmakers in both parties and has drawn exceedingly few vocal supporters.

Protests erupted in major cities shortly after the tweets and a group of 56 retired four-star admirals and generals warned the ban would “degrade readiness” and “cause significant disruptions.”

The commandant of the Coast Guard, Adm. Paul Zukunft, said he “will not break faith” with openly serving transgender members of the Coast Guard, which is part of the armed forces in wartime, in one of several public rebukes of the policy by top uniformed leaders.

Sen. John McCain, (R-Ariz.) who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, also lent his support to transgender troops in uniform.

“There is no reason to force service members who are able to fight, train, and deploy to leave the military—regardless of their gender identity,” McCain said in a statement.

The president’s posts prompted many to wonder whether the commander in chief could essentially tweet new policies into law. But the Pentagon announced shortly after the tweets that it would not make any changes until Trump had followed the normal order of sending over formal guidance.

“There will be no modifications to the current policy until the President's direction has been received by the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary has issued implementation guidance,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Joseph Dunford said in an internal communication.

The White House sent over its formal guidance in August, but already some of the teeth of Trump's unequivocal stance were taken out. The written policy empowered Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to determine whether those who are currently serving will be kicked out and allowed the government to pay for gender reassignment surgery if deemed necessary to protect the health of service members already transitioning genders.

Mattis then established a panel of experts to study how to implement the president’s policy and maintain military readiness. He also announced that those currently serving could stay in uniform and in the interim even re-enlist.

In November, the Pentagon approved — and paid for — a gender reassignment surgery, demonstrating how the Obama-era policies remain in place.

Mattis is expected to deliver recommendations on how to implement Trump's ban in February, with the new policy taking effect on March 23, 2018.

It could be all for naught, however. The federal courts have been far harsher in their push back, dealing the Trump policy a series of what could ultimately be insurmountable setbacks.

Four federal courts in Maryland, Washington, D.C., California and Washington State have issued preliminary injunctions, temporarily stopping the Pentagon from implementing the ban while the legal proceedings unfold.

The four lawsuits were filed by GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders and the National Center for Lesbian Rights in Washington, D.C.; the American Civil Liberties Union and Covington and Burling LLP in Maryland; Lambda Legal and OutServe-SLDN in Washington and Equality California in California.

Each case is going through the process of discovery, whereby each side can gather evidence from the other. Multiple lawyers that have brought the suits against the Trump administration said they hope to have a final resolution by spring, with a possible appeals process to follow. Multiple experts said they predict the case to ultimately end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the meantime, the Pentagon has issued new guidance that potential recruits must be “stable” in their gender before they will be considered eligible.

Two federal appeals courts, meanwhile, ordered the government to follow the Jan. 1 deadline to open the ranks to transgender recruits, in D.C. and Virginia.

While the courts are considering the ban, Congress is also weighing legislation to block it by law. Bipartisan bills have been proposed in the House and Senate that would prevent the Defense Department from kicking out troops based solely on their gender identity.

But Aaron Belkin, director of the Palm Center, a California think tank focusing on gender studies, said he doesn’t expect any action on that legislation while the courts and the Pentagon are still hashing it out.

“I don’t think Congress wants to get involved if they don’t have to,” Belkin said.

Callahan, for his part, hopes for some more certainty sooner. He said Trump's original tweets made him feel “completely disregarded and unwanted by this country."

The Pentagon maintains that is not the case — at least for now. Maj. Dave Eastburn, a Pentagon spokesman, said that Defense Department “will process transgender applicants for military service on Jan. 1, 2018, as mandated by recent court decision.”

In preparation, the Pentagon recently issued new guidance that potential recruits must be “stable” in their gender before they will be considered eligible.

Callahan, a party to the lawsuit brought by Lambda Legal-OutServe SLDN, is eager to test that in his quest to become a explosive ordnance disposal officer.

“There’s too many bombs in this world," he explained in an interview. "If I can help get rid of them in a safe way and save somebody’s life, that really means a lot to me, to be making the world a little bit safer.”

Total fucking asshole...

Trump to Dems: No DACA deal without the border wall

By LOUIS NELSON

Democrats seeking a deal to protect so-called “Dreamers” from deportation must be prepared to agree to a package that includes several White House priorities, including a border wall and reforms to the U.S. immigration system, President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter Friday morning.

“The Democrats have been told, and fully understand, that there can be no DACA without the desperately needed WALL at the Southern Border and an END to the horrible Chain Migration & ridiculous Lottery System of Immigration etc. We must protect our Country at all cost!” Trump tweeted.

Democrats have said they will not sign onto a bill next month to keep the government funded without a deal to protect Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children and in many cases have no relationship to their country of birth.

Dreamers had been protected from deportation under the Obama administration by a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which Trump rescinded, with a six-month delay, earlier this year. Trump said publicly that he hoped Congress would use the six months to codify protections for Dreamers into law, promising that “if they can't, I will revisit this issue!”

Last September, Trump nearly struck a deal with Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to protect Dreamers that included beefed-up border security but not funding for the wall, which the president had promised his supporters. But that agreement quickly fell through though, with the White House insisting on getting more from Democrats in exchange for a DACA deal.

Reforming the nation’s immigration system has been a priority of Trump’s that dates back to the earliest days of his presidential campaign, when he made curtailing illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border a bedrock principle of his candidacy. During the GOP primary, he pledged to deport every single undocumented immigrant from the U.S., a position he drifted away from during the general election.

Trump has mostly stuck to his hard line on immigration as president, calling specifically for an end to the practice of chain migration, by which one immigrant can sponsor family members to come to the U.S., and the Diversity Visa Lottery, a program that awards visas to screened individuals from nations with lower levels of immigration into the U.S.

The president has been critical of the Diversity Visa Lottery program since a 29-year-old immigrant from Uzbekistan who arrived in the U.S. via the program killed eight people in October by driving a truck along a crowded bike path in New York City.

A sign of mental illness...

Trump: My approval rating is the same as Obama’s was in his first year

By LOUIS NELSON

Lamenting the media’s coverage of his “so-called low approval rating,” President Donald Trump on Friday pointed to a poll that shows him with first-year numbers similar to those of former President Barack Obama, who Trump argued was not hampered by “massive negative Trump coverage & Russia hoax!”

“While the Fake News loves to talk about my so-called low approval rating, @foxandfriends just showed that my rating on Dec. 28, 2017, was approximately the same as President Obama on Dec. 28, 2009, which was 47%...and this despite massive negative Trump coverage & Russia hoax!” Trump wrote on Twitter, citing coverage from the Fox News morning show where he receives almost unflinchingly positive coverage.

The poll to which Trump referred was released Thursday by Rasmussen, showing him with a 46 percent approval rating and a 53 percent disapproval rating. Obama, on Dec. 28 of his first year in office, had almost identical numbers, according to Rasmussen: 47 percent approval, 52 percent disapproval.

The Rasmussen poll is somewhat of an outlier, though. Of the 12 polls that go into the RealClearPolitics polling average of the president’s approval rating, the 46 percent in Rasmussen’s poll was the highest score Trump earned, 3 points better than his next best score.

Overall, the RealClearPolitics polling average shows Trump with a 39.3 percent approval rating and a 56.2 disapproval rating, historically poor numbers for a president at this point in his first term. Obama, in late December of his first year in office, had an average approval rating of 49.9 percent, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average, and a disapproval rating of 44.5 percent.

Tax law creates confusion

Tax law creates confusion and uproar in city halls across America

Just a week after it was signed, the tax overhaul is already triggering a swift backlash from puzzled taxpayers and officials.

By AARON LORENZO

Mass confusion is erupting in town halls across the country thanks to the new tax law, as tens of thousands of property owners scramble to pay next year’s taxes ahead of schedule — while the governors of their states and the IRS give conflicting signals about whether that’s even allowed.

In the Albany suburb of Bethlehem, N.Y., more than 100 people waited in a gym to pay their property tax bills — some of them for over an hour — on Thursday before a new federal $10,000 cap on state and local deductions goes into effect Jan. 1. Municipalities on Long Island were preparing to open over the weekend to give taxpayers more time to pay. But the IRS issued an edict Wednesday night saying the early payments could only be deducted on 2017 taxes if they had already been assessed. That threw residents and local government officials into a new round of confusion as everyone scrambled to determine which payments would qualify.

The uncertainty this week could be the first of many misunderstandings to come as new tax rules take effect starting New Year’s Day. The tax law that President Donald Trump signed Dec. 22, which Congress rushed to pass before the end of the year, is explicit in some of its language, but vague in other areas. It explicitly forbade prepayments of state and local income taxes but was silent on prepayments for state and local property taxes.

“What the federal government did and the timing of their actions was, in our view, cruel and unusual,” said Steve Acquario, executive director of the New York State Association of Counties. “They passed this tax bill at a time of year when government is very much in transition to the next fiscal year. There was great confusion this week.”

Jack Peterson, a lobbyist at the National Association of Counties, said he’s fielded questions from county officials nationwide this week about what the full gamut of federal tax changes could mean for them, with the preponderance of prepayment inquiries coming from officials in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland.

“Any changes certainly take time and effort to properly implement and fairly implement,” he said.

The state and local tax deduction chaos erupted just days after the bill was signed into law. The new rules allow taxpayers to deduct their property taxes and either their state and local income or sales taxes up to $10,000 beginning Jan. 1, a change from the past in which all those state and local taxes were deductible without limit. So both New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo — whose states have high property taxes that well exceed that limit for many residents — issued orders encouraging people to prepay and deduct their 2018 taxes this year. Those orders just added to the confusion.

Lydia Leszczynski, tax collector from the Essex County town of Montclair, which has high property taxes, said residents prepaying them had only been thrown into more uncertainty by the IRS advisory as well as some language in Christie’s executive order regarding when payments have to be postmarked.

“If you want to make a prepayment, we’ll accept a prepayment. How it works out for them when they file taxes, I don’t have on advice on that,” Leszczynski said. “They have a lot of questions. It’s not just do you accept 2018 — do you accept the whole year. It’s that ‘what does it mean, can we do this?’ We’re not tax professionals.”

In addition to postmark uncertainty, there remained other payment date doubts based on the when checks were signed or received, or when the funds cleared. There is also ambiguity over what constitutes an assessment: an actual bill from a tax office or its notice of a property assessment for the year ahead?

“It’s a scramble,” said Cuomo, a Democrat, during an interview on MSNBC Thursday. “This is what happens when Washington passes a bill in the dark of night and doesn’t vet it with the public.”

New Jersey Senate President Stephen Sweeney said the new federal tax law will force New Jersey, a high-tax state, to re-examine school funding and other services.

People line up to pay their real estate taxes. | AP Photo
People line-up at the Town of Hempstead tax receiver's office on Tuesday to pay their real taxes before the end of the year, hoping for one last chance to take advantage of a major tax deduction before it is wiped out in the new year. | Howard Schnapp/Newsday via AP

The latest advisory from the IRS, he said, only aggravates things further. Sweeney had called on Christie to let residents prepay their 2018 taxes before Jan. 1, and Christie on Wednesday signed an executive order to make sure local governments allow it.

“And they’re raining on our parade in Washington as we’re trying to ease the pain for a year,” Sweeney said.

Like Christie, Cuomo on Friday signed an executive order removing legal barriers for prepayment. Cuomo’s order specifically authorized municipalities to accept partial prepayments, which the subsequent IRS guidance said wouldn’t be deductible on 2017 federal income taxes.

Gerry Geist, executive director of the New York State Association of Towns, said the changes were “extremely daunting and confusing.”

“When the governor made his announcement — and I applaud the governor for just trying to help in this situation — but we all sort of believed you could just take what you paid last year as an estimate and make the payment,” he said. “But when the IRS made its pronouncement on Wednesday and said it has to be assessed, that changed everything. In Westchester, you don’t have the assessment.”

The IRS was clear in saying that taxpayers must make their prepayment this year for next year’s real property taxes that have already been billed. Those rules are consistent with prior IRS practice and case law on prepaid property taxes, said Nicole Kaeding, an economist for the Tax Foundation.

In some places, such as Iowa, taxpayers should be able to deduct their prepayments of 2017 property taxes because they’ve already received bills that are due early next year, Kaeding said.

But it’s not as clear elsewhere, including New York, New Jersey and the Washington, D.C., suburb of Fairfax County, Va., where property taxes are billed in February for due dates in July and December.

That hasn’t stopped more than 7,300 property owners from prepaying from Dec. 20 through Dec. 27 via walk-in and mail transactions as well as wire transfers, according to Dawn Nieters in the county’s public affairs office. Those prepaid collections totaled $50 million on personal property and real estate taxes.

Officials in Fairfax, for which real estate and personal property taxes accounted for about $3.2 billion of its general fund receipts for fiscal year 2018, have advised property owners in the county to consult their own tax advisers or call the IRS for more information.

“Fairfax County makes no representations about the deductibility of the advance tax payments for federal or state taxes,” its website said.

Refunds are available for those who’ve prepaid but won’t get a federal deduction, should they apply for it. The Fairfax tax office just set up an email address to field refund requests, said Nieters: refunds@fairfaxcounty.gov.

2018 election-hacking

The latest 2018 election-hacking threat: 9-month wait for government help

Some states might not get an intensive DHS review until weeks before the midterm elections.

By TIM STARKS

States rushing to guard their 2018 elections against hackers may be on a waiting list for up to nine months for the Department of Homeland Security’s most exhaustive security screening, according to government officials familiar with the situation.

That means some states might not get the service until weeks before the November midterms and may remain unaware of flaws that could allow homegrown cyber vandals or foreign intelligence agencies to target voter registration databases and election offices’ computer networks, the officials said. Russian hackers targeted election systems in at least 21 states in 2016, according to DHS.

The scanning, known as a “risk and vulnerability assessment,” is the crème de la crème of security exams: DHS personnel come in person to do an intensive, multiweek probing of the entire system required to run an election. But department officials acknowledge that it’s of limited use if it doesn’t come soon enough for states to correct their flaws before voters go to the polls.

The nine-month wait is “not a good metric” for states hoping to boost their security, admitted Christopher Krebs, one of the DHS officials leading election security efforts. ”We are working to prioritize.”

Few fault the DHS itself for the holdup, but the delay is yet another dramatic example of how the government is struggling to safeguard the upcoming election season as the clock ticks toward Election Day.

Security experts, voting integrity groups and many lawmakers have expressed dismay at the lack of action on Capitol Hill and across the Trump administration to help states protect their election infrastructure. It’s especially critical after Russian hackers raised awareness during the 2016 elections of the creaky computer networks that house voter rolls, the country’s aging voting machines and the often overburdened election officials tasked with protecting the vote.

Congress has yet to pass any bill that specifically addresses election security, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions caused consternation when he admitted in a hearing that “we’re not” doing enough to block hackers from meddling in the 2018 elections. “The matter is so complex that, for most of us, we’re not able to fully grasp the technical dangers that are out there,” he said.

DHS has stepped into this void. In the final weeks of the Obama administration, the agency classified the country’s election systems as “critical infrastructure,” putting them on par with hospitals and power plants, which receive priority status for the department’s cybersecurity assistance.

Since then, DHS officials have been navigating choppy waters — persuading states to work with them despite their suspicions about federal overreach, waiting for President Donald Trump to appoint new cybersecurity leaders and shifting money and personnel.

The agency offers states a menu of election security services, ranging from sharing basic information on the latest hacker activity to weekly remote scans of election networks to the soup-to-nuts “risk and vulnerability assessment.”

Marian Schneider got one of the full-scale, in-person assessments last year as deputy secretary for elections and administration at Pennsylvania’s Department of State. It was the only state to do so before the 2016 elections.

“It is actually pretty extensive,” said Schneider, now head of Verified Voting, an election-integrity advocacy group. The state had to fill out a questionnaire. It had to sign a legal agreement that required lawyers some time to process. DHS sent four experts to do the probing.

DHS says the probes take two to three weeks.

“It’s resource-intensive,” Schneider said. “The reason there’s a waitlist is because a lot of states want it done because they do it at no cost. To have that backlog is a problem, but it’s a good thing states are wanting the service."

“The fact they might have to wait until third quarter of 2018 — it’s not great, but they should get on the waitlist,” she added.

Among the states POLITICO contacted, officials in Vermont, Connecticut, Colorado and New York said DHS told them to expect that any multi-week, in-person assessment would take time to get started — some officials said the estimates ranged from six to eight weeks to nine months. That means that even with the low-end estimate, states would not be finished with the assessment until shortly before primary season begins in March.

A DHS official told POLITICO that state by state, “the time frame varies, but we can shift around to address priorities.” The official didn’t have figures on how many states have requested or received the assessments.

Some of the wait depends on the states themselves, said Krebs, who is functioning as head of DHS’ main cyber wing, the National Protection and Programs Directorate.

“What we’ve seen more than anything is that when we have availabilities, the nimbleness of a state to say, ‘Yes, we can take that, we’re ready,’” he said. “We had a state a couple weeks ago that was able to do a snap [risk and vulnerability assessment] because we had a cancellation. We turn around to the top of our list, say to this state, ‘Are you ready to go?’ And they said, ‘Yup, we can do it.’”

Krebs said DHS is also moving personnel to accommodate demand.

“What we’re looking at doing is consolidating some of our teams and bringing people into the orbit” of the teams that conduct the assessments, he said. “With more people, I can do more. We are bringing resources in and reprioritizing across internally from a personnel perspective to ensure we've got more capabilities.”

Gregory Touhill, a former top DHS official and the federal government’s chief information security officer until January 2017, applauded Krebs’ efforts, but added that “I wouldn’t be satisfied because we’ve got an election that's in less than a year.”

Touhill, now president of digital security firm Cyxtera’s federal group, suggested DHS could also explore amplifying its election security teams with military cyber personnel or contractors.

Similarly, Congress could approve funding for extra personnel, said Schneider, the former Pennsylvania election official. But the agency might have already hurt its chances of making such an appeal to Capitol Hill. At a March hearing, then-DHS Secretary John Kelly said he didn’t need any additional money to carry out the agency’s duties under the “critical infrastructure” decision, which include the risk and vulnerability assessments.

The stance puzzled some lawmakers.

“Given the secretary’s position, I am concerned about reports of nine-month wait times for states and localities to receive some of the more in-depth cyber services DHS provides,” Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s top Democrat, wrote in an October letter.

In the meantime, DHS has delivered on an array of election security services that are more easily implemented. For instance, 31 states receive regular DHS “cyber hygiene” scans that probe election systems remotely and report vulnerabilities to those states.

A DHS official told POLITICO those scans take just a week or two to schedule.

Touhill stumped for the service: “The ongoing cyber hygiene scans with affected parties are really producing really good results and heightening awareness.”

States can also tap other valuable DHS digital defense tools.

The agency offers a cyber resilience review that focuses on helping election officials conduct their own self-assessments. It takes approximately two weeks to schedule and one day to finish, the DHS official said.

And upon request, the agency will also conduct a cyber infrastructure survey — an expert-led assessment accomplished through an informal interview. The survey takes approximately two weeks to schedule, according to the official.

So while the risk and vulnerability assessment is impressive and helpful, Schneider said, “It’s just one tool in the toolbox.”

Craziest Year!

Was 2017 the Craziest Year in U.S. Political History?

A dozen historians weigh in.

By POLITICO MAGAZINE

I magine how future historians might try to summarize 2017: A U.S. president, his family and his political aides came under investigation by a special counsel for possibly helping a foreign government meddle in the election. Talk of impeachment swirled through Congress, where the fracturing Republican Party was in the midst of an identity crisis—and the Democrats were, too. Twitter became a source of official U.S. policy. A wave of sexual harassment allegations took down U.S. senators and congressmen, top judges and reporters, and high-profile political candidates—but not the president, who had been caught on tape admitting to grabbing women “by the pussy.” We learned that the Pentagon has secretly been studying UFOs. All while the leaders of North Korea and the United States exchanged threats to rain down nuclear “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

But as unbelievable and unprecedented as this year seemed, how wild was it really? Does it come in No. 1 in the pantheon of American political chaos? Or, alongside the Civil Wars, assassinations, race riots and Watergates, does it not even rank? We asked some of the nation’s smartest historians to tell us whether 2017 was indeed the craziest year in U.S. political history, and, if not, what year’s got it beat. Here’s what they had to say. —Elizabeth F. Ralph

***

‘2017 has its own unmatched attributes’
Robert Dallek is the author of Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life.

Twenty-seventeen is certainly one of the most distressing years in American presidential history. Of course, it cannot match 1861, when the United States was tumbling into a civil war and Abraham Lincoln found himself helpless to prevent a conflict that would take more American lives than in any other bloodletting in U.S. history.

But 2017 has its own unmatched attributes. No president since opinion polling began in 1935 has had such poor numbers in his first year in office. Unlike Franklin Roosevelt, who never fell below 50 percent approval in the Gallup Poll during his 12-year presidency, Donald Trump has been stuck at between 36 and 42 percent. Nor have we seen so unproductive an administration, with more unfilled campaign promises, than Trump’s. Trump also has the unenviable distinction of being the only first-year president to have his administration under scrutiny by a special prosecutor. This has been a year to remember in presidential history.

***

1865: An assassination, a racist, a political fracture
Ron Chernow is the author of GRANT.

On April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. After four years of gruesome warfare, Grant laid down generous terms, issuing rations to famished Confederate soldiers and allowing them to take home their horses and mules to plant crops. For a fleeting and improbable instant, it seemed as if the war might conclude in fairytale fashion, with the Confederacy chastened and even repentant after the rebellion. Violence would give way to sanity.

Then, five days later, came the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. “Here was the rebellion put down in the field,” Grant later observed, “and starting up in the gutters.” The Great Emancipator and head of the Republican Party was succeeded by Andrew Johnson, a Democrat and an unapologetic racist, throwing American politics into turmoil. The Ku Klux Klan loomed just over the horizon. The events at Appomattox Court House had briefly promised regional harmony, but the radical change in leadership at the White House hinted that the deep fracture between North and South would harden into a permanent feature of our national life, a source of lunacy that bedevils us to the present day.

***

1919: Riots, racial violence, an absent president
Adriane Lentz-Smith is a professor of history at Duke University.

Nineteen-nineteen should have been a good year. The armistice ending World War I promised a return to calm, a restoration of civil liberties, and an ebb to the nativist hysteria that had made targets of German Americans. But the war’s end brought violence, not peace, to the American home front. Riots roiled across the nation, in towns from Charleston to Washington, D.C., to Chicago. Not contemporary riots but Old-World-style pogroms in which white mobs targeted black bodies, businesses and homes as a reminder that the “War for Democracy” abroad would not bring democracy back home. Although poet and former diplomat James Weldon Johnson labeled it the “Red Summer,” the firestorm lasted the entire year, with large-scale riots in 10 cities, smaller conflicts in scores more, and nearly 100 lynchings of African Americans (at least 13 of whom were veterans of the war). In September in Elaine, Arkansas, the revanchism of the Red Summer met the anti-radicalism of the Red Scare as white landowners led a mob of nearly 1,000 men in a massacre of black sharecroppers who had met to form a union.

All of this happened in the absence of presidential leadership. President Woodrow Wilson did little as white sailors beat black folks in the Washington streets, and he did even less to protect African Americans in Elaine and elsewhere. Amplifying his general indifference to African-American citizenship was his focus on Paris. Wilson had spent much of the spring negotiating the Treaty of Versailles and much of the summer trying to sell the nation on it. By fall he had done himself in. Brought down by a series of strokes in late September, he sat paralyzed, effectively, as the nation burned around him. In his name, his administration went after radicals and so-called black insurgents, rather than the white supremacists who had launched the wave of terror.

This past year, 2017, has looked more like 1919 than most Americans would like. White supremacy is again in fashion in the Executive Branch, and the president shows little interest in protecting the nation’s most vulnerable citizens. This is disheartening but not unprecedented. Yet, when we tell ourselves that things have been worse, we must also remind ourselves that we once made them better. We can—we must—do so again.

***

2017 ‘is a yawner by comparison’
H.W. Brands is a professor of history and government at the University of Texas and author of The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War.

So far, the Trump presidency has been noisy but unproductive. A young conservative justice added to the Supreme Court, yes. And now a tax bill, probably. But either of these would have happened under any Republican president with the current Congress. For Trump the campaign circus continues; the presidency has hardly begun.

Several other first years have been crazier, if that means surprisingly eventful. In Lincoln’s first year the Union fell apart and the North and South went to war. In FDR’s first year the welfare state was born. In George H. W. Bush’s first year the Soviet empire started to crumble. In George W. Bush’s first year, the 9/11 attacks introduced America to global terrorism.

Trump’s first year is a yawner by comparison, except that he won’t shut up and let us snooze.

***

1860: ‘Crazy in a terrifying way’
Jacqueline Jones is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

The year 1860 was crazy in a terrifying way. In the mid-19th century, partisan politics was akin to a blood sport, pursued by a small, privileged electorate consisting almost exclusively of white men. Yet in 1860, virtually all Americans understood that the results of the presidential election that November would affect every single person regardless of who they were or where they lived. At stake was a fundamental question that was roiling the nation: Should trafficking in human flesh remain legal?

The fast-moving events of 1860 upended the two-party system, threw into disarray traditional political alignments, and triggered the secession of South Carolina from the Union. In the summer of 1860, the Democratic Party cracked up, splitting into two factions. The southern wing promoted the extension of slavery, while the northern wing wanted to leave the issue up to the individual states. The new Constitutional Union Party promoted the thoroughly discredited idea that compromise on the slavery issue was possible. The Republican Party, which represented northern anti-slavery interests, had been in existence for only six years; it nominated Abraham Lincoln. By mid-summer most Americans understood that the fractured Democratic Party guaranteed a Republican win at the polls in November. Election Day saw a turnout of 81.2 percent of the eligible voting age population (in contrast, the figure for the election of 2016 was 55.5 percent). Responding to Lincoln’s victory, the South Carolina General Assembly approved an ordinance of secession on December 20, a move that would be replicated by 10 other southern states determined to protect the institution of slavery from Lincoln and a Republican Congress. The seceded states provoked a war that claimed 700,000 lives. More Americans died in the Civil War than in all other wars in the nation’s history combined. The end of the war proved that it was not the year 1860 that was crazy, but the self-deluded secessionists who assumed any conflict with the Union would be but a brief romp.

***

1968: ‘The most tumultuous year we should remember’
Leo Ribuffo is a professor of history at George Washington University.

I could choose any year of the Civil War, for reasons that should be obvious. Or I could pick 1877 or 1919, for reasons that are slightly less so. In March 1877, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes became president as part of a sordid but sensible deal to resolve a corrupt and violent election. Hayes took office amid a recession that, during the summer, precipitated a bloody national railroad strike eventually broken by state militia and federal troops. In 2017 terms, damage was comparable to the destruction of major airport terminals and hundreds of planes. Nineteen-nineteen was marked by the start of post-World War I “stagflation,” murderous anti-black riots in many cities, defeat of the Versailles Treaty after a bitter congressional debate, and a Red Scare with ideological legacies lasting at least through McCarthyism. President Woodrow Wilson hunkered down in the White House almost totally disabled by a stroke.

But 1861-65, 1877 and 1919 probably seem so 19th- or early-20th century to readers of POLITICO Magazine. Therefore, the award for the most tumultuous year we should remember goes to 1968. It wasn’t all sex, drugs, and rock and roll. American deaths in Vietnam peaked at nearly 17,000. Assassins killed Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Amid the urban uprisings following King’s murder, the fires in Washington, D.C., were the worst since the British attacked the city and burned the White House in 1814. Richard Nixon was elected president after campaigning as a moderate, which in a way he was because segregationist George Wallace on his right got 9.9 million votes. Nineteen sixty-eight also merits the prize because many of today’s officials and pundits were already adults. President Donald Trump turned 22, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi 28, and CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer 20. With minimal effort, they could remember what an extraordinary national crisis looks like instead of promoting the apocalyptic self-absorption of the present.

***

1973-1974: A political scandal, a resignation, a market crash
Vanessa Walker is Morgan assistant professor of Diplomatic History at Amherst College.

This past year has made a strong case for the “craziest year” in American politics. While most presidents have preferred at least the veneer of respectability, the current administration seems to delight in the specter of open dysfunction and provocation. Still, in our never-ending whirl of scandals and crises, let’s not forget the final year in office of Richard Milhous “When-the-president-does-it-that-means-it’s-not-illegal” Nixon. Nixon started the last year of his presidency with covert support for the coup in Chile that toppled one of the strongest democracies in the hemisphere in September of 1973. This was followed quickly by the Yom Kippur War in October, resulting in the OPEC embargo and oil crisis. And humming away in the background was the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, the country’s (then) longest conflict. And then there was the Watergate scandal: gross abuses of executive power to intimidate domestic political opponents, obstruct justice and undermine the constitutional separation of powers. Facing impending impeachment, in August 1974 Nixon became the first and only president to resign the office. Gerald Ford, a fundamentally decent man, took over the presidency only because the former vice president, Spiro Agnew, had been forced to resign less than a year earlier under charges of conspiracy, fraud and bribery. The same day Ford sought to heal the country by pardoning Nixon in September 1974, he was greeted with headlines about U.S. covert operations that had led to the military coup in Chile. Ford thus had the dubious distinction of being the first president to publically acknowledge U.S. covert operations.

By the time Nixon gave his final iconic and unrepentant wave as he boarded the helicopter to leave the White House, he had championed the benefits of dividing the American public through “positive polarization,” attacked the press for its “unfair” and “biased” coverage of his administration, dismissed anti-war protestors as “bums,” and promoted the image of himself as a “madman” with his finger on the nuclear launch button to scare the North Vietnamese back to the negotiating table.

Even with all of this, 2017 could go toe-to-toe with the last year of the Nixon White House in terms of political sensationalism. So, what gives 1973-1974 the edge? Amid our very real political turmoil this year, we have been spared the miseries of that unfortunate 1970s malaise of stagflation. Just imagine this past year with the addition of a serious stock market crash, double digit inflation, and cars lined up around the block waiting for gas. The current booming economy has clearly tempered public impatience with the political shenanigans that have marked this year—and puts Nixon’s last year in office in the lead for crazy. Of course, there are still two weeks left in the year, and 2017 has been nothing if not unpredictable.

***

1968: ‘It’s hard to think of a more chaotic year’
David Greenberg is professor of history and media studies at Rutgers.

It’s hard to think of a more chaotic year in contemporary American history than 1968. After years of mounting social discord over civil rights, civil liberties, changing codes of behavior and the war in Vietnam, many citizens now firmly believed—be it with hope or dread—that a revolution was nigh. The year began with the Tet Offensive, which convinced many Americans the war was unwinnable, and ended with the presidential election victory of Richard Nixon, a man whose political career had been said to be over just six years before. In between, turbulence reigned.

Six weeks after Tet, a second-tier Minnesota senator, Eugene McCarthy, nearly upset President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, leading Johnson to forsake a second full term. Three weeks after that, the era’s greatest civil rights hero, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis. And later that spring, the Democrats’ best hope for retaining the White House, Robert F. Kennedy, was also murdered—on the night he won the final presidential primary, in California—by a Palestinian terrorist, Sirhan Sirhan. On campuses like Columbia University’s, student strikes halted normal operations. In cities like Washington, D.C., riots leveled black neighborhoods. Antiwar protesters clashed with Chicago police in August at the Democratic convention; in September feminists protested the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. To look abroad brought Americans no relief either, as violent protests rocked cities from Mexico City to Paris, and Rome to Prague—where Soviet troops crushed the so-called Prague Spring. In December, one bright spot gave Americans some reason to look to the future: As part of the Apollo 8 mission, the first men orbited the moon—suggesting perhaps that if life on earth seemed irredeemably conflict-ridden, new frontiers of hope lay ahead.

***

1920: ‘The world was in chaos’
Nicole Hemmer is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

No year can compete with 2017 in terms of the volume and pace of news. But in terms of chaos, 1920 would be a solid competitor.

The world was in chaos. The Great War had ended just weeks before, and it was still uncertain what, if anything, would emerge from the rubble. In the first few months of the year, Congress voted first against joining the League of Nations, then against ratifying the Treaty of Versailles, leaving the state of world affairs, and America’s role in them, an open question.

At home, social and economic chaos reigned. The U.S. military rapidly demobilized, bringing four million troops home without any plans for their reintegration. Agricultural markets, buoyed by the war, collapsed, triggering a farming depression that would last for two decades. Massive strikes, which had started a year earlier, continued to roil American industry. This mass unrest triggered fears of anarchy and communism that led to America’s first Red Scare. The Justice Department organized raids of questionable constitutionality, rounding up thousands of leftists.

You want political chaos? In early 1920, the public became aware of the extent of President Woodrow Wilson’s debilitating strokes, which left him largely incapacitated for the remainder of his term. The impending presidential election saw the electorate doubled by the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. And what an election it was: Warren G. Harding, the dark horse Republican nominee, was a newspaper man who had newly minted Hollywood celebs campaigning for him while the RNC sent his mistress—and her husband—on a cruise to Asia to keep them away from the press. He ran against another newspaper man, James Cox, and the socialist Eugene Debs, who in 1920 conducted his presidential campaign from federal prison, where he was being jailed for speaking out against the draft.

Oh, and in September, the U.S. experienced its deadliest terror attack to date, when a horse-drawn carriage exploded on Wall Street, killing 38 people and wounding hundreds more. No wonder that by November, Americans were ready to vote for the “return to normalcy” Harding had promised: 1920 had left them reeling.

***

1861: ‘Democratic politics … came very close to a breaking point’
Joshua Zeitz is the author of Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson’s White House.

“The people are impatient,” Abraham Lincoln confided to Montgomery Meigs, the Union Army’s Quartermaster General shortly after the close of his first year in office. “[Secretary of Treasury Salmon] Chase has no money and he tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?”

Americans today are living through turbulent and unsetting times that will test the elasticity of our political traditions and institutions. But we’ve endured worse. No one knew it better than Lincoln.

In 1861, democratic politics in the United States came very close to a breaking point. Eleven states seceded from the Union, leading the Senate to expel 11 members, including former Vice President John C. Breckenridge. Thousands of Army and Naval officers renounced allegiance to their country. In response, the president summarily suspended the writ of habeas corpus (something he most likely did not have the constitutional authority to do), not just in the rebellious states, but also in Maryland, which remained in the Union only after he placed roughly one-third of the state legislature behind bars.

We’re not currently on course for a second civil war, and on the whole, America’s public institutions—the courts, law enforcement, state governments—have held their own against the threat posed by Trumpism (and by its congressional enablers). But there’s some lesson in that earlier era.

As unmoored as it was from past experience, 1861 merely presaged five years of greater revolutionary activity that followed. Southern Democrats had formally repudiated democratic process, and in response, Northern Republicans felt emboldened to undertake counter-measures that in very recent memory would have been unthinkable. They confiscated rebel property, created a new paper currency, borrowed vast sums of money, funded the construction of land grant colleges and transcontinental railroad construction—the education and infrastructure bills of their day. They emancipated and granted citizenship to four million slaves.

Writing later that decade, the historian George Ticknor observed a “great gulf between what happened before in our century and what has happened since, or what is likely to happen hereafter. It does not seem to me as if I were living in the country in which I was born.”

For every political action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. As was true in 1861, we’ve only seen the start of it.

***

1890: An unpopular tax bill, voter suppression, an impending revolt
Heather Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College.

Every time the U.S. government swings too far toward oligarchy we have a political crisis as a small minority tries to retain power in the face of an angry and growing opposition. This tension gave us 1860, as well as 1932. It also gave us 1890.

In May of that year, Republican congressmen yelled and cheered as they passed a major revenue bill that gave rich businessmen everything they wanted. They had forced the bill through, ignoring regular order, Democratic amendments, and the voters to whom they had promised financial “reform.” As congressmen celebrated, a Democrat yelled across the aisle: “You may rejoice now … but next November you’ll mourn.”

Republicans just laughed. They felt utterly secure. Sure, Republican policies were hideously unpopular, but people would like them once they understood that government protection of workers was socialism and would undermine American greatness, while giving money to capitalists meant investment in the economy that would trickle down to poorer Americans. In any case, Republicans couldn’t lose. They had gamed the system to control the government no matter how unpopular they were. Their president had lost the popular vote but they had won the White House through the Electoral College anyway. They had quietly taken over a popular media outlet to trumpet the administration’s talking points. They suppressed the Democratic vote. And they had monkeyed with the system by adding six new states to the Union: North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Wyoming and Idaho. With these new Republican states, they expected that they would never again lose the Senate or the presidency. Big-business Republicans celebrated their permanent remaking of the American government.

But the Democrat who told them they would mourn was right. The extremists controlling the government had alienated not just Democrats, but also most Republicans, who lamented that their party had been replaced by a corrupt organization only interested in making the rich richer. Over the next two years, Republican leaders watched aghast as voters did the unthinkable, tossing them out of power in Congress and the White House, and beginning the political revolution that led to the Progressive Era.

***

‘In the realm of craziness, 2017 has no contenders’
Jack Rakove is professor of history and political science at Stanford University.

In ordinary times, crazy is not a useful variable of social science or a helpful framework for historical analysis. But of course, ordinary historical time ended 13 months ago (and counting, day by day, hour by hour, tweet by tweet), and the question arises: Is this the craziest year in our nation’s political history? The working historian can readily identify other years that were patently more momentous, and we can justify their importance by invoking all those factors that we spend our scholarly years studying. But in the realm of craziness, 2017 has no contenders.

Why is that the case? One could argue, for example, that the new Republican mode of lawmaking, which involves drafting legislation behind closed doors, with no serious discussion, to fuel some madcap rush to get a vote, represents a crazed alternative to the Madisonian model of serious prolonged deliberation. Or one could hold that it is a crazed model of governance to experience one traumatic weather emergency after another, yet turn our institutions of environmental regulation over to a crowd of climate change deniers and big business chumps.

But the best case for craziness inheres in our prolonged uncertainty over the mental state of our chief executive. There are already countless ways to measure the ever-oscillating mood swings in the White House. Just consider the two long newspaper pieces that have run in the last fortnight, with the New York Times describing Trump’s working day—or is it better called viewing day?—while the Washington Post details his persistent preference for the word of Vladimir Putin over the reports of his own intelligence agencies.

In my view, however, the real craziness of 2017 is best expressed in terms of constitutional theory. Our Constitution vests the entire executive power in a single individual. No worse joke has been played on the American people than the very fact that tens of thousands of eighth graders have a far better grasp of the Constitution than Donald Trump, even though he swore a sacred oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” it on January 20, before the record crowds he deluded himself to see assembled before him. That’s not just political craziness; it’s truly meshugah in every sense of the term. Just try to imagine a conversation with Jefferson, Madison, either Adams, or Abraham Lincoln—strong constitutionalists all—on one side of the table, and the current chief executive on the other. That would be crazy, too!